"I was benevolent and good; misery made me a fiend. Make me happy, and I shall again be virtuous." — Mary Shelley, Frankenstein
The monster was not born a monster. He watched a poor but loving family through a crack in the wall, studying their kindness from the outside. He was intelligent, gentle, more emotionally perceptive than most humans. And yet he knew — with absolute certainty — that he could never be one of them. Not because of anything he had done. Because of what he was.
This is not a post about monsters. It is about the quiet, private terror of believing you are unlovable. And it is about what that terror does to the shape of your desires — especially the ones you hand over to someone else.
The Crime of Existing
The monster understands something that most people never have to confront: that being treated as human is, in fact, a privilege. It is not granted to everyone equally. The visibly different, the psychologically scarred, the socially invisible — they learn early that the baseline courtesy extended to "normal" people does not apply to them. They are not invited into the circle of ordinary warmth. They watch it from the outside, through the crack in the wall.
What makes this unbearable is not loneliness itself. It is the structural nature of the exclusion. The monster does not think, "I have not yet found someone who loves me." He thinks, "I am the kind of thing that cannot be loved." The difference is everything. One is a temporary circumstance. The other is an identity.
And so he asks the question that sits at the heart of this essay: "Was I then a monster, a blot upon the earth, from which all men fled and whom all men disowned? I cannot describe to you the agony that these reflections inflicted upon me."
The Paradox of Self-Hatred
Here is the strange thing about feeling monstrous. It does not make you stop wanting love. It makes you want it more desperately, while simultaneously believing you do not deserve it. You do not become indifferent to affection. You become obsessive about it. You study it. You strategize for it. You perform for it.
But you also never trust it when it arrives.
Happiness, when it comes close, feels like a hot iron pressed into your palm. You flinch. You pull away. You look for the catch. Because deep down, you carry the conviction that there is something fundamentally incompatible between your nature and the experience of being loved. The love is real — but you are not real enough to receive it. You are an imposter in your own life. Sitting at the family table, you feel like a cuckoo chick who has stolen a place that was never meant for you.
This is the psychological architecture of shame. It is not guilt — guilt says "I did something wrong." Shame says "I am something wrong." Guilt can be atoned. Shame can only be hidden.
Permission, Authority, and the BDSM Mind
If you have followed the arc of this essay to this point, you may already see where it intersects with the dynamics of power exchange.
The person who feels intrinsically unworthy of love often develops a particular relationship to authority. If you cannot trust your own worth, you need someone else to certify it. If you cannot grant yourself permission to exist fully, you need someone else to grant it. The dominant becomes not just a partner but a validator — a gatekeeper who says: You are allowed. You are wanted. You are good.
This is not inherently unhealthy. In fact, it is one of the deep psychological functions that D/s dynamics serve. A well-structured power exchange relationship can give someone permission to experience pleasure, to take up space, to ask for what they need — things they have never felt entitled to on their own.
But there is a line. When the need for external permission becomes a replacement for internal self-worth rather than a gateway to it, the dynamic becomes precarious. You become dependent not on the person, but on their validation. Your identity becomes contingent on being chosen. And if the relationship ends, you do not simply lose a partner — you lose the only evidence you had that you were lovable.
What the Monster Teaches Us
Frankenstein's creature is not a cautionary tale about hubris. It is a mirror. The monster's tragedy is not that he was created wrong. It is that he was never allowed — not by his creator, not by the family he admired, not by the world. Every attempt he made to connect was met with revulsion, not because of his actions, but because of his appearance. His story is one of radical exclusion.
And here is the uncomfortable truth: many people carry a version of this monster inside them. The version that believes, quietly and persistently, that they are too broken to be loved. That their desires are too dark, their wounds too deep, their history too messy. They bring this belief into relationships, into kink spaces, into the quiet moments at 3 a.m. when no one is watching.
The work of untangling this is not about finding the right dominant. It is about slowly, painfully, learning to grant yourself the permission you have been outsourcing. To believe — even against the evidence your own mind presents — that you are allowed to exist. That you are allowed to want. That love is not a reward you must earn, but something you are capable of receiving without breaking.
Between the Door and the Wall
The monster stood at the threshold, watching happiness through a gap in the door. He never crossed it because he believed he had no right to. What he needed was not an invitation — it was the understanding that he was not a monster at all.
And perhaps that is the real work of BDSM done well. Not to create new dependencies, but to dismantle old ones. Not to become someone's only source of permission, but to help them discover that they were always allowed — to exist, to desire, to be loved — long before you ever gave them the words.
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